SHAREPOINT 2016 PREVIEW RELEASE DROPPING IN AUGUST – WHAT TO EXPECT IN THE NEXT VERSION

At the Worldwide Partner Conference, it was announced by Microsoft that an early release version of SharePoint 2016 will be released in August. With the full release expected in 2016, here is what to expect in the upcoming release of Microsoft’s on premise collaboration solution.

Say Goodbye to SharePoint Foundation

SharePoint Foundation has been part of the editions of SharePoint as the “free” version bundled with Windows. Many organizations use SharePoint Foundation as a basic collaboration solution and then eventually upgrade to the “professional” or “enterprise” versions.

Microsoft has announced that there will no longer be a SharePoint Foundation in the upcoming edition of SharePoint 2016.

Hybrid Will Be Easier and More Sophisticated

Many organizations have concerns about moving to the cloud and/or have particular workloads that are not suitable to the cloud. Microsoft has been promoting the hybrid option where some content is on SharePoint 2013 on premise and some content is on Office 365 as a solution for those organizations that want to keep some sensitive documents on premise while allowing more ad hoc collaboration scenarios within Office 365.

SharePoint 2016 will make hybrid integration easier and more sophisticated in the following ways:

Easier hybrid setup through wizards that replace PowerShell scripts

True hybrid search that allows you to integrate search results from SharePoint 2016 on premise and Office 365 in the cloud

Surfacing of content on premise within Office 365’s Delve

Increased Limits

As hardware and software become more sophisticated, the limitations of previous SharePoint versions around capacity have either increased or have become unlimited. Some key limits that will increase include:

The size of content databases will increase from 100-200 GB maximum in SharePoint 2013 (and even less in previous versions) to multiple terabytes.

SharePoint had some limitations on the number of list items with a maximum view size of 5,000 items. This will be increased or potentially may change to unlimited in the next version.

In the current version of SharePoint, the maximum file size you can upload is 2 GB. This will move to 10 GB in the next version.

The number of indexed items in the search will increase to 500 million items.

From Outlook Attachments to SharePoint Document Libraries

One of the key reasons why our clients move to SharePoint is to promote the use of collaboration through centralized document libraries instead of sending dozens of versions of a document as attachments in Outlook.

With the next version of Office and SharePoint, attachments in Outlook will be stored in your SharePoint One Drive instead of as an attachment. Email recipients will receive a URL to that document instead of an attachment. This enables attachments to be stored as documents in SharePoint and enables the document features found in SharePoint such as co-authoring, records management, search, taxonomy, etc. that aren’t available when you send a document as an attachment.